This disclosure relates to determining demographics of a program audience. Advertisers often set exposure goals for advertising campaigns for advertising content, e.g., television ads, and devise strategies to achieve these goals, e.g., when to air the advertising campaign content. Accordingly, advertisers are very interested in knowing the number of viewers in program audiences and the demographics of program audiences, e.g., the percentage of male and female viewers for a given program, and the age distributions of the male and female viewers.
The number of viewers of a television program can be determined in a variety of ways. For example, viewing device logs, such as set top box logs that include channel tune records, can be analyzed to determine the number of set top box devices tuned to particular television programs at particular times. Additionally, some device logs also include segment information, e.g., data that describe segments based on behavioral, demographic and location characteristics of a viewing audience. For example, some households may be categorized to one or more segment clusters (e.g., Equifax demographic interest clusters or Nielsen PRIZM clusters) that describe the segments of the viewers. Typically the segment data are generated by a process that is different from the process that is used to generate ratings data for television programs, i.e., the segment data are determined independently from the ratings data.
Panels or surveys can also be used to estimate the number of viewers by demographic group using panels or surveys. However, it is sometimes impractical to sample enough households to determine the audience composition for every particular television program. Accordingly, while some ratings information may be available for particular television programs, the programs may still be unrated with respect to demographics.